Sunday, March 29, 2026

The Man Who Runs Angels Flight Is Coming to the Foothills to Talk About the Neighborhood It Once Served

[photo credit: Lanterman House]

Historian Nathan Marsak brings Bunker Hill’s lost transit history to Lanterman House — a story about what gets saved and what gets razed

Nathan Marsak goes to work each day at Angels Flight, the century-old funicular railway tucked against the eastern face of Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles. He pulls the levers. He runs the cars. He ferries strangers up and down the same steep slope that Victorian-era Angelenos once climbed to reach their mansions — before the automobiles came, and the streetcars faded, and the redevelopment agency arrived, and the mansions came down.

That neighborhood — Bunker Hill — is what Marsak has spent nearly two decades writing about. It is also the subject of his free illustrated lecture at Lanterman House on Sunday, April 19, just minutes from the Altadena border in the La Cañada Flintridge foothills. The talk will trace how the horse-drawn world of one of Los Angeles’s most storied hilltop communities gave way to streetcars, then automobiles, and ultimately to a wholesale clearance that erased a neighborhood of Victorian Queen Anne homes and Edwardian apartment buildings from the city’s map.

For Pasadena and Altadena residents — who live in communities where Craftsman bungalows, 1920s storefronts, and century-old street grids continue to navigate the pressures of development — the history Marsak tells is less a distant cautionary tale than a recurring set of civic questions about what cities choose to keep and what they choose to remove. Readers should note: the Pasadena Now calendar lists this event on April 5; the Lanterman House website lists April 19. Attendees should confirm the date directly with Lanterman House at 818-790-1421 or lantermanhouse@gmail.com before making the trip.

Marsak is the author of five books on the subject: Los Angeles Neon (2002), Bunker Hill Los Angeles (2020), Bunker Noir! (2021), Marsak’s Guide to Bunker Hill (2023), and a revised edition of Arnold Hylen’s Los Angeles Before the Freeways. He worked on the curatorial staff of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and served as historian for the LAPD Museum archives. He also writes the blogs OnBunkerHill and bunkerhilllosangeles.com, where — since 2007 — he has maintained a detailed public record of the neighborhood’s lost built environment.

His interest in Bunker Hill, he said in a 2025 interview with the Los Angeles Public Library, has the quality of an obsession with a place that no longer exists. “I suppose it’s akin to being interested in Atlantis,” Marsak said. “It’s a lost world and mythic, and whose stories are often more mythical than rooted in reality.”

The talk will focus on what the Lanterman House event listing describes as “one particular hallmark of the modern age: the automobile, and its role in reshaping the Bunker Hill landscape.” According to the event listing, Marsak will trace how the neighborhood’s horse-drawn infrastructure responded to the arrival of “new motive power, streetcars, emerging systems of access, and an era rooted in speed” — a progression that ended, ultimately, not with adaptation but with demolition. Bunker Hill, according to that same listing, “failed to conform to modernity, and was ultimately wiped away in the name of progress.”

The setting for the lecture — Lanterman House — adds a layer of contrast the event listing does not supply. The 1915 concrete-and-craftsman residence, designed for Dr. Roy Lanterman and his family in what was then a rural La Cañada valley, is one of the few surviving pre-1920 residences in La Cañada Flintridge — a house that weathered a century of change and remained standing. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994 and maintained since 1993 as a museum by the nonprofit Lanterman Historical Museum Foundation under a city ownership arrangement, it offers a different answer to the same question Bunker Hill posed: what survives, and what does not.

Marsak’s work as a historian and his daily role at Angels Flight place him in an unusual position relative to his material. Angels Flight, the funicular he now runs, is itself one of the few physical remnants of Bunker Hill’s transit infrastructure. Dismantled in 1969 when the Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project cleared the neighborhood, and stored for nearly three decades, it was reinstalled in 1996 half a block south of its original location and reopened to the public on August 31, 2017, following safety upgrades.

The lecture is free. Seating is first come, first served. Event day parking is available at La Cañada Congregational Church, 1200 Foothill Blvd., La Cañada Flintridge; on-site parking at Lanterman House is limited to 10 vehicles. The event runs from 1 to 2 p.m. Confirm the date with Lanterman House before attending.

What Marsak understands, having spent years in the archives and each working day on the railway, is that the neighborhood did not simply disappear. It was pushed out by a set of decisions about how a city should move — decisions made in the name of speed and modernity, decisions that still carry consequences. He operates the railway that survived those decisions. On Sunday, he will explain how most of the neighborhood did not.

HISTORY OF BUNKER HILL AND TRANSPORTATION Date & Time: Sunday, April 5, 2026 at 1:00 p.m. Venue: Lanterman House, 4420 Encinas Drive, La Cañada Flintridge, CA 91011. Phone Number: 818-790-1421. Website: https://poodle-trumpet-ndyy.squarespace.com/lanterman-house-tours